Online Account Instructions for Your Partner: A Perth Parent’s Inventory of Email, Photos, and Logins

You’re raising kids in Perth, you and your partner share a household, and between you there are more online accounts than either of you could list from memory. Your email, the cloud where every photo of the kids lives, the password manager, two old social profiles, a loyalty program with years of points, the family streaming logins. If something happened to you tomorrow, your partner would be locked out of the parts of your digital life that matter most — not because the accounts are secret, but because nobody ever wrote down which ones exist.

The problem

Provider deceased-user processes are inconsistent and slow. Some platforms have a memorialisation flow, some require a death certificate plus a court order, and some have no documented process at all. The common failure isn’t the provider’s process — it’s that the surviving partner doesn’t know which accounts to ask about. The photos of your children’s first years sit in a cloud account whose username your partner never knew. The email your accountant uses to reach you becomes a black hole.

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance reminds families that a will deals with assets that form part of your estate. Online accounts are rarely “assets” in that sense — they’re access relationships with providers, often non-transferable, and they aren’t addressed by a standard will. Your partner needs an inventory: which providers, which usernames, which accounts you want closed, which you want preserved for the kids.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per online account: the provider name, the username or email identifier, whether you’ve set up a recovery contact or legacy contact with that provider, and your closure-or-preserve preference. It does NOT hold passwords, recovery codes, 2FA seeds, or the contents of your password manager. Your partner sees the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and under the Privacy Act, the personal information you record about yourself and your named partner is held under the Australian Privacy Principles, with disclosure only on your authorised release.

How it works

  1. You add each online account to your vault — provider name, username or email identifier, whether a recovery or legacy contact is configured at the provider, and whether you want the account closed, memorialised, or preserved.
  2. You name your partner as the recipient for the online accounts module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  3. You add notes that matter for the kids — which cloud account holds the family photo library, which email address school correspondence comes to, which loyalty program is worth claiming.
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the online accounts module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner contacts each provider directly using their published deceased-user process. The vault accelerates the enumeration step — knowing what to ask for — not the provider’s decision.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families often run a digital life heavier on cloud storage than the national average — long-distance family in the eastern states and overseas means more video calls saved, more shared photo albums, more accounts spun up for relatives who want to see the kids grow up. When one parent dies, a Perth household that hasn’t enumerated those accounts can lose years of family memory inside providers whose recovery processes assume the surviving person already knew the account existed. A clear instruction set — provider, username, recovery contact status, closure preference — is the difference between your partner reaching the photo library in week one and never reaching it at all.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Perth families

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Perth can register their first online accounts module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your passwords, not your recovery codes, and not your 2FA seeds.